Ten days seems like a short time when I think about everything I want to prepare for your return. It seems like a long time when I lie down at night.

I’m doing alright. It’s possible you’re missing me more than I’m actively missing you. But then, I miss you all the time. When you’re working, when you’re too tired or distracted to really be here. So I hope you come home refreshed. In the meantime, I must keep myself busy, because this is different than the usual separations.

The wind is screaming through, the sun is hot, the tomato jungle in the living room is driving me crazy. I’ve been tilling and planting a bit. I have constant errands and child-events to deal with. I feel like I’m spinning my wheels and constantly behind. Nothing is broken so far.

I can’t help thinking several times a day of what it would be like if you didn’t make it home. It’s a shadow I have to keep pushing aside, and focus on the wait and the work instead. But it’s made me realize that the life I would be living without you is the life I shaped around you and your dreams. It’s your gift to me.

You established me as a person, and I wouldn’t be myself if not for your influence on my entire adult life. You are the cross-current that pulls me down branching streams I never thought to explore. You are the sun that’s thawed me and the storm that’s watered. You are unruly, happy-go-lucky, exhausting chaos. I tend to trigger people, but you are the business end of the double-barreled gun that is us. The relative quiet I have for these few days is only peaceful because it’s temporary.

I wish I’d done more to make things ready for when you come again, but I’ve hit my limits. I’m in pain, I’m tired, I’m alone with the child chatter. I hope it will be enough. I hope we’ll do even more together, after. I want to make this life for you, and this home.

Not just the one you wanted; what we chose together. That’s a beautiful and conflicted mystery–we’ve battled through the decisions, and this is ours. Sixteen years is more than time passing, more than lists of things done and things to do. More than half my life with you.
And so much more than a romance or a set of responsibilities. Compatibility is a minor detail next to choosing companionship and fellowship and fidelity. Comfortable compatibility, I think, would not have the same spark as this dance. Look what it builds. Look how it blooms.

I will see you again soon.

~C

I’m totally in White Rabbit mode trying to get this done while the teenaged feet which live in the bedrooms through that doorway are gone for a week.

But also, 7am is a grand time to stroll through the yard. Since I missed my Wednesday photo post (I’m supposed to be going to walks and doing nothing, in the pursuit of life balance, and bringing back evidence to prove it), here’s a look at the spring’s blossoms around my country homestead.

Let’s see.

1) Though I do my best to react entertainingly when people irritate me for the fun of it, I actually don’t like it. I have four kids doing it all day, every day, and by noon most days, the hell has already been annoyed out of me. After my limit’s racked out, only my baby sister can get truly away with it.

2) My almost favourite thing in the world is positive sarcasm. In other words, making hilarious fun of bullhockey opinions, attitudes or events for the purpose of genuine enlightenment and education. But there are other things that are even prettier.

3) I adore roses. To me they are not a love flower, they are an everything flower. Yellow for friendship, white for whatever, just pass the roses so I can snort them and feel the happiness.

4) I like jewelry. Jewelry, unlike roses, is a love thing–very precious and preferably originating from my husband. Or family members. The earrings I wear every day are from my parents and I’ve had them for 20 years.

5) I have a pretty-shoe obsession. Fastest way to distract me: take me to the shoe store.

6) I think gestures towards other people are truly effective when they’re founded on listening to what others want and need. Sarcastic hilarity, roses, jewelry and shoes would not impress me on the basis of their assigned social value if I didn’t already like them. I also like recycled brick, railroad ties, trees and shrubs, floor tile, a good claw hammer, my one-ton truck, and being left alone for long periods. See what I mean?

7) My life lesson still to be learned: Standing up for my writing work the way I’m willing to stand up for others. Writer Cat is basically gentle and submissive, unless collecting on nonpayment. Editor Cat tolerates no crap, particularly if said poo is flung at clients or colleagues. Perhaps someday the twain shall meet and the universal balance shall be restored at last.

Alright, that’s that. And now, you who are about to die, salute me. I nominate:

1. YA fantasy author Diane Graham – Your spunk and honesty is better than gourmet coffee for a pick-me-up.
2. Fantasy author Benjamin Collier – your humor makes me laugh as few do.
3. Christian theism and philosophy at The Areopagus – Versatility indeed: from philosophy and theology to sheer quirkiness. Win.
4. Writing, laughing, living with Linda Yezak – you are SO much fun!
5. The spiritual journal of Laurie Mathers – I love your thinking, I love your way of expressing.
6. Life, unplugged, at Faith Returns Home – you are so beautiful and strong, my friend.
7. Unschooling, geek life and gentle parenting with Heather Young – it’s good to have a fellow untraditional home. Also, dragons. Yay!

How to play: 1) Say thank you. Or, since it’s me you’re dealing with, say something socially unorthodox, like “Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!“. 2) Share seven things that will help people know you better. 3) Optional: Pick seven more bloggers you think others should know about, if you have time, inclination, and the kind of online friends who would like to receive a green icon with swirly handwriting and a flower on it.

Thanks again, Jennette. This may be my only post this week, but what good fun.

A Pastoral Setting

The guy who gets up and talks every Sunday at our Christian gathering is a farmer. If I were to say “the pastor of our church,” the mental image would be completely wrong for a lot of modern North American churchgoers. There’s no spire at our gathering. There’s no three-piece suits. No giant Bible on a stand at the front. There’s no show lights or rock band or postmodern barista.

It’s more like an extended family gathering of people who actually like each other. It’s a small-town community hall where we line up the stacking chairs, just as we do for school concerts or the Lions fundraiser, and we get together as neighbours. Pastor J often has dirt under his fingernails or exhaustion lines around his eyes. But he and his wife are there caring for us every week.

Hippocratic, not Hypocritical

I will prescribe regimens for the good of my patients according to my ability and my judgment and never do harm to anyone. -The Hippocratic Oath

Our prayer requests often revolve around health needs and travel mercies. That’s okay. Church shouldn’t be a branch on the local grapevine when it comes to personal stuff. We’re all sensitive to that on each other’s behalf, and on behalf of our own friends and family who aren’t necessarily churchgoers. We are not there to expose people’s lives to scrutiny.

Pastor J has been there for a decade, constantly caring. He knows exactly where the lines are. He’s from here, and he knows how the local culture operates. He’s taken the time to think about navigating it with integrity, but also respect. The two are not mutually exclusive–they come together under the banner of grace.

Because family and good relationships are as sacred as anything this side of heaven. And the one thing we can do for each other is to first do no harm.

To be safe.

Before Truth Happens, There’s Something Else

Safety is foundational to the expression of the sacred–that which is most valuable to someone, most worth protecting and setting apart from the taint of daily matters and generic wear-and-tear. Safety allows people to say “I love you.” It allows people to say “I disagree.”

It’s the greatest gift we can give each other. You don’t have to be the stronger person to provide it. You just have to be willing to leave aside your own agenda, feelings or opinions–the little endorphin hits that come from feeling right or powerful or justified.

To be a safe person, you don’t have to have much faith in anything supernatural, for that matter. But a deep belief in the value of other people’s security and well-being is absolutely vital.

This is why, sometimes, pagans or atheists have been my better, safer friends.

Pseudo-Sacred: Creeping Death

There’s a kind of sacredness afoot that is not truly sacred at all: an inverse of the real thing. It creeps in because true sacredness is potentially dangerous. The real thing involves exposure of the deepest veins of the human spirit–love, conviction, fidelity, honesty. There’s room for a world of hurt in living such things openly.

Pseudo-sacredness demands love, demands conviction, demands fidelity, demands the nakedness of honesty–demands sacrifice from people, yet does not promise to treat them pastorally in return. Rather, it’s committed to its own existence as a model of the self-defined holy ideal. It’s both its own means and end. People are commodities in that exchange. The falsely sacred presents emotional and psychological endangerment as an act of holy martyrdom.

There is such a thing as a church which forces people to exist for it. And I think that is sometimes what hurts and drives away people who are seeking the real thing.

In fact, fabricated holiness has to be antithetical to people seeking the truly sacred. Because false sacredness is unsafe in all the wrong ways. It is not risk wrapped in security; it is false security embedded with risk.

Sola Fide: It Is Finished

But in the authentic Christian paradigm, Christ died for us–He didn’t demand sacrifice, He created safety by sacrificing His life for us.

According to Christ’s teachings, service to others is a second commandment modelled after a first and greatest one: to enter into relationship with God. To give of one’s heart and convictions should be an act of love and ever-increasing freedom, not self-endangerment to prove one’s standing in the club.

It took me a few years to figure that one out, because my first-ever church, obsessed with its internal politics and protocols, was no help. Later on, it struck me one day, out of the blue: Learning sacredness wasn’t cutting me off from anything but my own shackles.

It was for freedom that Christ set us free. (Gal. 5:1a)

Sacred and Safe

But I will preserve the purity of my life and my arts. -The Hippocratic Oath

So I noticed awhile back that, in our very little church, as we shared requests, we were speaking of something deeply profound and deeply personal; something shared by permission. We were speaking of an average, normatively secular man who had a heart attack on the way home from visiting our congregation.

He was not given a positive prognosis. He asked Pastor J to visit him in his hometown, in the hospital where he ended up.

They ended up talking about God. About Jesus dying for our personal sins. You could almost suspect it was like something out of a bad tract–if it were something two-dimensional and contrived, that is.

Except that Pastor J doesn’t make that kind of demand on people. That man recognized safety, and asked him about the sacred.

The Day we Talked

So, likewise, there was no demand involved in talking about that man trusting Christ. Through utter serendipity, if one believes in such things, he made Pastor J’s acquaintance just before the vagaries of mortality caught up.

And he wanted us to know, though he couldn’t be there to tell us. Because his funeral happened.

That’s how, in our little church, where personal privacy is an understood need, we ended up talking about the deeply personal decision to believe crazy things–like the existence of sin, and the existence of a soul.

And the existence of a saviour.

We talked about the sacred, because it was safe.